Category The Suzuki Method
Book Four
Suzuki Book Four arrived yesterday – I ripped the CD into iTunes but have yet to listen. I hope to get to that tonight after I get home from a long day at work. The book opens with some tonalization exercises, including the well-known Brahms Lullaby, which looks totally approachable. Teacher hasn’t spent a lot […]
A Bach Bourree Finish
Apparently I passed the Bach Gavotte in D Major – in yesterday’s lesson Teacher took us onto the final piece in book three, a bourree, also by Bach. If I was enamored of the last Bach gavotte (and I am) then this new bourree is totally spectacular. I’ve been looking forward to it since starting […]
Teaching Creativity
The Sunday New York Times contained a popular article (it was in the popular list, anyway) entitled, “How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.” Regular readers will know that I’m interested in pedagogy – how to teach and how to motivate people to learn. The column, by Adam Grant, is about learning […]
Memory and The Suzuki Way
Memory and learning are horribly unfair beasts. Very little is understood about the way humans store information, but what we do know is that most learning is associative – that is, we attach bits of information, or associate them, with other bits of information we already know. A corollary to that idea is the fact […]
Picking Favorites
Of all the songs in my repertoire, the one I play best is the Suzuki Book Two Bouree by Handel. I’m not sure why it comes out better than the rest. While it’s true that I now play it a lot because I like playing pieces that I play well, I’m not sure how it […]
Unexpected Pleasures
I was talking to Michael last night about expectations. Suzuki learners are supposed to listen a lot, so I do. A CD comes with the books, and when I’ve purchased a new one I’ve listened to them quite a bit, to the point that the tunes are familiar and I can hum along with them. […]
A New Gavotte
The gavottes just keep piling up – Wednesday I began working with my third gavotte, and that’s only counting the gavottes in Suzuki Book Three! There was one in Book One and several more in Book Two. This new one is by J. Becker, whom Wikipedia reports is Jean Becker, a German violinist living from […]
Growing into Hunter’s Chorus
As a rule, I don’t play all my old songs anymore. Nowadays all I’ve kept in the rotation from Book One are the Bach minuets for warming up G Major (one of the three is a Leopold minuet but The Suzuki School has never noticed). From Book Two, I’ve held on to the final two […]
Reading Dr. Sacks
I’m in the middle of reading Musicophilia, a 2007 book by Dr. Oliver Sacks I downloaded for Kindle after reading his obituary in the New York Times about a month ago. The book is making me aware of some structural brain differences found in professional musicians versus the rest of the population. Sacks points to […]
Memory: A Theme and Variations
Suzuki Book Three opens with a Gavotte by Martini – the Suzuki Book doesn’t cite the source work’s title, but the site I found the other day sources it to Martini’s Sonate D’intavolatura per L’organo e il Cembalo Sonata No. 12: V. Gavotta. The piece is a theme and variations kind of number, and I’ve […]
Ryan Libel 